Intercultural Dialogue and Ethical Challenge

in the Latin-American Thought

Victor Martin Fiorino

How to cite
Martin Fiorino, V. (2016). Intercultural Dialogue and Ethical Challenge in the
Latin-American Thought. Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 1(2), 109-
123.
Retrieved from
http://www.mediterraneanknowledge.org/publications/index.php/journal/issue/archive

1. Authors information
Universidad Catlica de Colombia Bogot, Columbia

2. Authors contact
Victor Martin Fiorino: martinfiorino@yahoo.com

Article first published online: December 2016

- Peer Reviewed Journal

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 Intercultural Dialogue and Ethical Challenge
in the Latin-American Thought

VICTOR MARTIN FIORINO

Universidad Catlica de Colombia Bogot, Columbia

Abstract
The article analyzes some central problems of the intercultural dialogue in the context of
philosophical, historiographical and political debates promoted by the contemporary Latin-
American thought. The analysis concerns: the anthropological and ethical approach of inter-
culturality by Arturo Andrs Roig, its relation with the literary avant-gardes in Latin Amer-
ica and its expression in a liberationist philosophy oriented to overcome the patriarchalism;
the interculturality as a space for the asking by the other and as intelligence to live together,
as well as its educational consequences, with regard to a pedagogy and to an ethics of de-
colonization; the relation between interculturality and integration of peoples, on the basis of
the proposal of Giuseppe Cacciatore about the ethics of imagination.

Keywords: Ethics of imagination, Intercultural dialogue, Latin-American thought, Libera-

tionist philosophy, Pedagogy of decolonization.

In an essay on Filosofa latinoamericana e interculturalidad (Roig, 1997, pp.

132-144), the Argentinian philosopher Arturo Roig in 1997 stated that la
filosofa latinoamericana tiene como uno de sus temas recurrentes y
decisivos la relacin filosofa-cultura. De ah, que la problemtica actual de
la interculturalidad y, en particular, del tipo de dilogo que genera, as
como su teorizacin, sea cuestin, asimismo, de importancia para la
Filosofa latinoamericana tal como la venimos definiendo. A short time
before he had specified, nevertheless, no es una filosofa de la cultura y si
tuviramos que cualificarla deberamos decir que ms se aproxima a una
antropologa que a otro campo del saber (ibid., p. 132), given that it is a
philosophizing about a determined historical subject. The same author
distances himself on two topics: first, the subject comun y a veces
obsesivo of cultural identity, considering it una forma discursiva
ordenada sobre categoras que juegan encubridoramente respecto tanto de
nuestra unidad, como de nuestra diversidad social y cultural (ibid.). Sec-

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

ondly, from a sort of ontologa de la cultura, anchored to the relation

subject-object, es quema de todo acto de dominacin y explotacin and
that in the field of interculturality can drive to study of the other and its
culture to enable its dominion.
According to Roig, within the anthropological mark of the Latin
American philosophy, that he would define in other works as an
anthropological a priori, the idea that lo humano apoya ms en lo
contingente que en lo necesario, ms en lo accidental que en lo
sustantivoy, parafraseando el clebre dictum de Giambattista Vico, que
no es verbo ser el que nos ha de ayudar a responder por lo humano, sino
el verbo nacer, el que para el filsofo napolitano no significa comenzar a
ser sino construir nuestro ser (Roig, 1981) is put forward. This starting
point is articulated with what the author calls moral de emergencia, from
which human dignity, located at the root of intercultural communication,
can be considered desde la contingencia, el universal impulso que nos
mueve a todos hacia la autoconstruccin de nuestra humanidad (Roig,
1994). This spurs the author to propose a deconstruction of some macro-
categories that, with their presence, prevented intercultural relations. Be-
yond a mere culturalism, we need to critically review the influence exer-
cised by anthropocentrism on all our views of the world. Using the concept
of geo-centrism as a referent, Roig shows that, despite observing the
universe from our human condition is unavoidable, other thing is hacer de
esa condicin una cuestin de poder en relacin con el otro, en un nivel
asimismo primario, el de las relaciones interhumanaslas relaciones entre
etnias son, por cierto, humanas, pero marcadas por diferencias culturales,
por ejemplo, el lenguaje o la religin; mientras que las relaciones entre
miembros que comparten una misma cultura las llamaremos, simplemente,
interhumanas (Roig, 1997, p. 138). In any kind of relations there are phe-
nomena of economic, social, cultural or generic asymmetry which can be
understood by the figures of master and slave, which characterize the
patriarchalism, basic core from which different kind of exercising dominion
over the others come: logocentrism, androcentrism ethnocentrism,
hegemonism. According to the author la filosofa intercultural y, dentro
de ella, la etnofilosofa, no son ms que rostros de una filosofa
liberacionista la que tiene, entre otros de sus objetos, aquellas relaciones
entre culturas y etnias, pero tambin y primariamente, enfrentar el

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 Intercultural Dialogue and Ethical Challenge in the Latin-American Thought

patriarcalismo como categora omnicomprensiva de todas las formas de

dominacin y subordinacin humana (ibid.) of disowning. Examining the
critical and combative role of the avant-gardes, Roig argues that fue en el
campo de las letras y la plstica donde se dieron los primeros pasos en la
construccin de un discurso de odos adecuados para la percepcin del
otro. In this way the opportunity to hear new voices, including that of
woman and of indigenous Latin-American population, arose. In the literary
avant-gardes, that according to the author are precursor to Latin-American
philosophy, a new sensitiveness was cultivated, which get close to the
human in listening and dialoguing: no se trataba nicamente de ser ca-
paces de or la voz del otro, era necesario que todos conquistramos nues-
tra propia voz. Therefore, the development of dialogue and the effort to
decolonize thought and speech result convergent. There is no doubt that,
along with the precursor role of the avant-gardes, the dichotomies that fed
many (prevalently academic) discourses, such as those of the superior and
vulgar and its result in the disdain of the so-called inferior races or popu-
lar arts, represented serious difficulties, obstacles and blocks in the Latin-
American intercultural dialogue (Roig, 1997, p. 143). Unlocking its possibil-
ity can contribute to make real the polyphony discussed by R. Fornet-
Betancourt (1994), the polylogy proposed by F. M. Wimmer (1995) or the
multilinguistic dialogue of M. L. Gil Iriarte (1996).

1. Interculturality as a space of interest for the Other

Contemporaneity seems deeply characterized by a new universalism:

that of the global homogenising culture, based on the answer (technologi-
cal, ideological, operational) to the needs, either spontaneous or induced, of
human beings all over the world. The answer, transformed in material or
immaterial product that operates in the global market according to his use-
fulness, is the same for all human beings, irrespective of their different cul-
tural horizons; therefore the difference, that can be considered the element
of real anchorage to real life of people and communities, is completely de-
valuated. The logic of the answer is that of effectiveness, productivity, fast-
ness; starting from this, it excludes the reflective dimension, considered an
unproductive waste of time, and places an important section of human be-

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

ings outside the field of moral assessments and obligations. The societies
that Zygmunt Bauman defines characterized by moral blindness, refer-
ring to the concept of adiafora (Bauman & Donskis, 2015), establish moral,
ideological and technological schemes of quick answer to the global stimu-
lus present in an exhausting informative saturation, which drives citizens
to isolation, insensitiveness toward what happens to the others and to the
complete indifference toward what happens in the world. Along with
universalism - globalising and, sometimes, justified as answer to itself -
there were cases that E. Trias (2003) called local shrines, ethnical, cultural
or religious groups that radicalize the traditional values of some closed
communities. In both cases, the consequence of the disregard for difference,
for the Other, has brought violence and has worsened politics as a space of
dialogue.
Within this context, today a central problem is to re-establish the power
of the word closest to the experience of human life as a space of diversity,
of what is different and, at the same time, space of peace, negotiation,
learning. This power is the question, asking as a communicative action
which expresses an essential aspect of human existence and which finds its
roots in the imagination as an ethical dimension, able to open opportunities
for the intellectual construction of a more human life (G. Cacciatore, 2013).
As a demand of learning and growth, asking is historically built with
three different meanings. First there is the asking to know: what is, in the
sense of understanding, knowing the cause of something, searching its root,
explaining; it is a kind of asking that has the expert as its model. This mean-
ing, considered typical of the human being in the classical Greek philoso-
phy, starting from the thought of Modern Age began to achieve a central
place, today not diminished, putting apart any other asking and involving
all the spaces of life, starting from reason. The second is the communicative
asking, of the person: who are you? how are you?, in the sense of understand-
ing, opening oneself to the relation in which there are the messages ex-
changed among people, groups, cultures; it is the asking to the person
without reducing the message to previous rational categories, but trying to
insert it in the intention and in the life of the speaker, and that cannot be
known like the interlocutor himself. It is the asking that tries to take the
place of the other. The third is the asking that questions, criticizes every-
thing and is open to possible changes, that of protestation and typical of the

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moral assertion because that is the way and cannot be different, that tries to
question in the sense of contesting, and refusing.
The different meanings of human asking are interconnected thanks to
the concept of research, understood respectively as cause, person and fu-
ture. Moreover, as it is a human preoccupation, they relate themselves with
the research of explanation, sense and persistence (Marin, 2014). The space
of asking in which human beings and cultures can establish an intercultural
communication is that of the person and of his actions, in the interconnec-
tion among specific contexts and in search of a sense. Compared to the
meaning of asking to know, the other cannot be reduced to object of
knowledge, because when it happens, the fact of understanding the other
and its culture turns into a strategy of subjugation. With regard to the criti-
cal meaning, the asking that questions the present cannot drive to a dia-
logue with the other, as it aims to include the maximum of human realiza-
tion and happiness peculiar of each culture and that, being part of the proc-
ess of intercultural dialogue, are related with the creation of the condition
for being freely chosen.
As a specifically human and therefore conflicting power of the inter-
rogative, inquisitive, problematic word - asking has always been risky: it
has troubled regimes, knowledge and cultures that, from a position of
power, felt to be threatened by the question and, more, by who asks: the
other, the different. Asking is establishing a distance, introducing a differ-
ence. The authoritarian power, as well as the traditional education, the self-
referential cultures, the rigid societies, have always considered it a conflict
to avoid, a dysfunction to be corrected, a pathology to eliminate. The dif-
ferent under both the literal and the metaphoric point of view is always
the stranger, who came from abroad or is found outside the established in-
terests. This situation drives us to the words of Homer about the foreigner
who bears truth, something that could or can be dangerous, to the point of
speaking ungrateful poleis, that mistreated Homer but later claimed to be
his birthplace (Luque Lucas, 2006). Learning to valorise this ability to dis-
tance oneself and, at the same time, to interrogate oneself starting from the
question means to acknowledge the value of the others (Bello Reguera,
2006), following a path articulated at least in three parts: it begins with the
sensitiveness of acceptance, continues with the prudent exercise of reason
which recognises dignity; ends with the affective-cognitive ability to join a

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

project of mutual learning and growth. Thanks to intercultural dialogue,

we have opportunity to overcome the ungrateful poleis and to build po-
lis cordiales, of acceptance and coexistence.
The effort to progressively extend the spaces (cultural, social, politic) of
question and to improve the protection and the activation of the right of
asking (political institution, human rights) has characterized the history of
human beings. This can be seen by the perspective of development, not
continuous but spasmodic and paradoxical, of two complementary lines of
capability: on the one side, those corresponding to knowledge, effective
and processing, necessary for the dominion of the elements that threaten
the survival, globally understood; on the other side, those related to the de-
velopment of knowledge, based on its power but directs it from a pruden-
tial perspective, easing the understanding of the limits (of cultures, socie-
ties and political systems) and of the differences, to learn by them without
renouncing to appreciate their own things. In this way the knowledge that
feeds off the sources of intercultural communication is precious not only
for the survival, but also for life. The perspective of a more and more com-
plex scenario - in order to allow, from the one side, the quality of human
life and, from the other side, the existence itself of the species despite the
threats to the life of the planet - underlines the importance of the prudential
approach proposed from the birth of bioethics (Van Potter, 1971) ad today
accepted by prominent international bodies (UNESCO, 2015a; 2015b).
In the West the XX century was characterized by some questions that
until now, in the XXI century, have not received an answer. Man can sur-
vive? asked Eric Fromm (2000) in the Fifties, as scenario of the question: Can
we live together? formulated by Alain Touraine (2000) and, finally, Must we
bear everything? recently asked by Csar Tejedor and Enrique Bonete (2006)
about a very discussed topic in the intercultural field. These questions,
whose answer is still open, are characterized by two essential interroga-
tives: one reflective, can we choose our future?, expressed by G. R. Urban
(1973) at the beginning of that we elsewhere called the new political cen-
tury (Martin, 2012); the other communicative: how to live together? Living
together seems not to be, for human beings, an option among the others,
neither a condemnation, but a decision and an opportunity; however, it is
necessary to ask how, in order to transform the opportunity into decision.

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2. Interculturality as intelligence to live together

Studies on neurosciences argue that the progressive construction of hu-

man knowledge allowed the birth of an intelligence stimulated in its devel-
opment by the difficulties of adapting to hard contexts (Marina, 2012;
Gardner, 1994). The intelligence for survival drove to a significant increase
of the ability of dominion exercised trough knowledge, that allowed to sub-
jugate nature to human designs, making the human will a measure of life.
Later this ability was exercised to put under control elements of anarchy
and social conflict: protestation, social discussions, rebellions (Roig, 1998),
using for that purpose institutions and power of the State and, thanks to
the progress of technology, a new stage of the process of subjugation and
conditioning of minds and behaviours began, in order to put them at the
service of market and political ideologies, of rigid moral systems, of differ-
ent kinds of fundamentalism and racial, cultural and religious prejudices.
Within the pre-political space characterized by the violent attitude to-
ward difference, the fights for survival political, cultural, religious exac-
erbated the elements that, in an interested way, claim to give a sense to
human actions, starting from a determinate we political, cultural, reli-
gious that denies, in the name of the protection of the group, what is dif-
ferent, because it is considered a threat. In the pre-political space of vio-
lence, what is different, as a justification of indifference, hostility or ag-
gression (cultural, political, religious), is concretized in the different human
beings that, until they will considered a bar to be dominated for carrying
out a project of a determinate we, will be excluded and any opportunity
to be considered interlocutors will be denied. In the interpretation of the
other as a threat, in their hermeneutical absorption by an authoritarian I,
typical of a pre-political logic, any opportunity of encounter among differ-
ent entities (cultures, civilizations, religions) disappears and a determinate
logic of confrontation as an exercise of power prevails, based on the con-
struction of the different as a threat and on its exclusion by a number of
tools (coactive, discursive or symbolic, but always violent) directed to the
real cancelation of the different (Arendt, 2006).
Within the logic of power, the reduction of the threat represented by
the different has been presented under the form of integration, under-
stood in coactive and reductive sense, actually realized by forcing the other

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

to uncritically adapt integrate to a closed totality (economic, ideological,

religious), that considers itself as true, superior unique or, anyway,
unavoidable. In this case, integrating means to submit and this questions
the value that we can see in the other and the degree of compatibility con-
sidered admissible among habits, experiences or praxis that have a po-
tential of confrontation with the correlative elements usually admitted in-
side the we. However, such potential of confrontation must not be un-
derstood as generator of intercultural violence (Bello Reguera, 2006); the
development of initiatives like, for instance, the proposal of communities of
intercultural dialogue and argumentation (Quintero, 2011), can pave the way
to overcome the levels of the potentially violent contradiction, driving them
to levels of contrariety, potentially complementary.
Terrorism and dramatic migration processes that affect several parts of
the world, mainly the European countries, on the one side question the real
validity of human rights and international treaties (F. Cacciatore, 2013)
and, on the other side, the fragility of the integration processes and the lim-
its of the proclaimed cooperation and solidarity relations. In Latin America
history offers many examples of this logic, whose discussion is found in the
present scenarios of the processes of integration among countries, as well
as within countries and religions (Martin, 2016). The concept of integration,
considered within the logic of power and without considering the asymme-
tries among countries, regions and social groups, support the juridical ini-
tiatives of the treaties on the matter and it has also fed educational and
communicative programmes directed to consider its acceptation as conven-
ient or unavoidable. There is no doubt about the importance of linking the
projects of intercultural ethics to the efforts to develop an education for the
Latin-American integration in a plural and critical sense (Martinez &
Hernndez, 2014-15). Educating to interculturality and educating to inte-
gration are two convergent processes within a critical review of the poten-
tialities of globalization.

3. Education and intercultural dialogue

Education to interculturality needs to analyze the relations both con-

frontational and non-confrontational of the exchange among cultures. We

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cannot demand the elimination of the conflicts, given that the diversity of
life entails them as an its own conflict. It is necessary to separate conflict
from violence: violence is not a necessary element of conflict, even if it can
be essential in case of an inappropriate answer. The concept of intercultural
conflict, read in the key of the present world, neither entails nor justifies
any kind of violence. Starting from the scholars who analyzed the positive
view of conflict (Galtung, 1998), it represents an opportunity to build coex-
istence in the stages of management, learning and transformation of con-
flict. As underlined by R. Salas (2011), coexistence is built to carry out har-
mony, an improvement of the balance that, as a process, is realized through
a series of theoretical-practical interactions and is not established through
the fast way of the reductionist appropriations, like several times the ra-
tionality of the West tried to do.
According to M. A. Bartolom, within the perspective of interculturality

los seres humanos ya no poseeramos slo nuestra cultura de nacimiento sino que seramos
propietarios de mltiples tradiciones, a las que invocaramos de acuerdo con el contexto
interactivo coyunturalsin embargo, esta perspectiva no debe dejar de lado los aspectos
polticos y econmicos de la globalizacin y la imposicin cultural que genera, ya que lo que
realmente se globaliza es Occidente. Entendida as, la interculturalidad sera slo una nueva
denominacin para la Occidentalizacin planetaria y la destruccin de la diversidad cultural
(Bartolom, 2006).

The westernisation of the planet cannot in any way be the scenario of

encounter and dialogue among cultures, first because it prevents the ac-
knowledgement and the valorisation of non-western cultures (in the Euro-
pean and North American sense), rejecting what is learnt by the exchange
of meanings, symbols and valorisation of cultural spaces like those of Asia
(China, India, Japan) or America (maya, nhualt, quechua, aymara). There-
fore it cannot be built as a platform to stimulate agreements able to make
possible the creation of an intercultural ethics. Moreover, at political level,
this makes impossible to reach a global governance for a more balanced
and less violent world (Berggruen & Gardeis, 2012). From a Latin-
American perspective of the analysis of the history of the regions coun-
tries, of their relations and projects of integration, the intercultural ap-
proach requires to overcome the situation of colonization and neocoloniza-
tion. M. P. Quintero stated:

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

Consideramos necesaria para una comunicacin y educacin intercultural en Amrica

Latina, entre las culturas criollas y las culturas fundacionales, la mediacin, el puente que
proporciona una Teora y prctica de la Descolonizacin, que incluya una epistemologa,
una psicologa, una pedagoga y una tica de la Descolonizacin (Quintero, 2011, p. 36).

Education to interculturality begins with the development of mecha-

nisms that tries to stimulate intercultural dialogue. We refer to interdisci-
plinary spaces and educational tools considered, as highlighted by M. P.
Quintero (ibid., p. 34), an universal necessity, whose importance comes
from the fact that

la coexistencia de culturas diferenciadas requiere de estrategias de relacin intercultural, por

lo que el pluralismo cultural o multiculturalismo no es pensable sin el desarrollo de un
dilogo intercultural (Bartolom, 2006, p. 126).

To approach to the peculiarity of the intercultural dialogue as a process

to establish a real mutual relations, R. Salas-Astrain (2003) summarises the
orientations on the formal and contextual regulatory criteria, the intercon-
nection of specific contexts, the starting point in the interest of the diverse
subjects and communities, the priority of the conflict that can be solved, the
exclusion of any element related to the pretense of mutual understanding
and the resolute refusal of any recourse to violence. With regard to the
regulation of the intercultural dialogue, the latter follows - as argued by
Martinez and Hernndez (2014-2015) regulatory criteria derived from
both formal principles and peculiarities of their context. About the
intercultural communications, the same authors argue that it is un
producto inestable de la interconexin de contextos especficos and para
poder generar un verdadero intercambio discursivo, es preciso partir de las
formas argumentativas existentes histricamente de facto y no disolverlas
en un modelo abstracto, with the aim to reach a common level of
discursive rationality.
The intelligence necessary to live together in the diversity is found on the
basis of an approach to the processes of integration of Latin American coun-
tries that must be based on mutual dialogue, learning and enrichment, in or-
der to promote the human development by mechanisms of intercultural
communication able to lead to the valorisation of their own things and by

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 Intercultural Dialogue and Ethical Challenge in the Latin-American Thought

the relation with the different, understood as bioethical, intercultural and

prudential fundaments (Franco 2011). It is necessary to dialogue in order to
achieve, in deliberative communities, the implementation of strategies of
self-knowledge, self-valorisation and self-affirmation, organised on educa-
tive elements of decolonisation of mind and development of creative imagi-
nation in order to design and wide the horizon of the possible. These targets
involve both institutions of formal education and the educative function of
mass media in the creation of spaces of learning based on respect, dialogue
and active tolerance for the search of shared minima. Starting from different
ethnic roots, from different national stories and different encounters, the
process of acknowledgement of the shared minima can put them into prac-
tice on the basis of similar historical processes and common social experi-
ences; in Latin America the colonial period and the stages of the neo-colonial
cultural emptying marked shared experiences of subjugation and of cultural
learning of self-devaluation (Quintero, 2011).

4. Interculturality and integration

The different roads taken in Latin America to advance in the process of

integration of peoples and cultures with significant differences, with spe-
cific encounters and historical-political processes, raised many debates
about the real actors and the aims of the integration: integration of lites,
without the population; integration of markets, with superficial homogeni-
sation of cultural models. The triumph of a rationality based on efficiency
but lacking the polemic imagination and the disregard for a prudential ra-
tionality directed to sustainability. In Latin-American countries acknowl-
edgement, otherness and valorisation (Martin, 2011) have been challenges
to establish effective strategies and policies of intercultural dialogue, until
now widely deficient. The slow passage from multiculturalism to cultural
pluralism and intercultural dialogue moved in parallel with the slow pas-
sage towards projects of integration important for the people of the region.
The confrontational experience of the arrive of European powers in
American lands questioned the possibility of a community of origin as a
fortress for a thought of integration. The independence wars raised the dis-
cussion about the difficult construction of a community of life that, due to

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 Victor Martin Fiorino

the political events, established basis of survival. This continued even later,
in the neo-colonial period. The community of destination, as third element
of creation of an integrating process, was built in the moment of maximum
strength in the history of the Latin-American countries. As future is con-
structed through intercultural dialogue as processing power of present and
past, it depends on the opportunities of establishing a new universalising
rationality able to create an open common model, in the convergence be-
tween the value of the single experiences (with a critical work of intra-
cultural valorisation) and the encounter with the different experiences
(trough tools of intercultural education).
The forms of coexistence have always been imagined starting from con-
ditions that have denied them. In the history of the West, the polis imag-
ined by Aristotle, understood as a project of possible coexistence, was im-
possible. Therefore we can think that nowadays the project of the intercul-
tural coexistence is the task of the imagination, as underlined by G. Caccia-
tore (2015, p. 53):

El nexo imaginacin/interculturalidad asume un peso especfico determinante tambin

en el mbito de las polticas y de las ticas que estn fundadas en una visin pluralista y
dialgica de las civilizaciones y de las culturas.

In order to realize an actual exchange in the space of reason and rules

built in the intercultural dialogue, it is necessary to break the forms of hy-
bridisation and reciprocity creatively imagined: starting from the narration
of cultural contexts and from an effort to translate their languages,

se constituye una actividad imaginativa capaz de reemplazar la fijeza de los principios

ordenadores de una cultura con formas de contaminacin, lugares de un posible futuro
saber comn y espacios en los que se comparten decisiones ticas y derechos fundamentales:
la supervivencia, la integridad de la persona y la reduccin de las situaciones de indigencia,
la ampliacin de las chances de actuacin de las capacidades personales (ibid., p. 54).

Imagining the possible coexistence among cultures and human groups

makes possible to activate the potentiality of a mutual agreement among
the actors, that can become real trough intercultural dialogue and repre-
sents the beginning of the intercultural ethics. The aspect of imaginative an-
ticipation present in the dimension of a project can feed the space of open-

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ing to knowledge, valorisation and solidarity in the processes of integra-

tion. According to G. Cacciatore, the role of the ethical and political imagi-
nation is essential to approach the problems of integration of the Latin-
America countries:

Es justamente el aspecto simblico-imaginativo lo que puede dar mayor fuerza a una

declinacin de la interculturalidad como espacio que hoy no se puede dejar de privilegiar si
se quiere propiciar el dilogo y el encuentro de culturas e identidades (ibid., p. 57).

A philosophy of interculturality seems to be requested by ideas and

praxis of hybridization and encounter. The experiences of encounter, start-
ing from the horizon of the fights and of the critical conscience that imag-
ines the possible transformation of the social and political reality, can be the
starting point to build a new form of universal rationality

que no pretenda incorporar y cancelar las diferencias culturales. De esta forma se torna
posible hablar de una verdadera tercera va respecto del indigenismo utpico mitolgico y
de la lgica mercantil y homologante de la globalizacin neoliberal (ibid. p. 66).

The basic assumption of the Latin-American integration processes can

be based on a new kind of universalism:

Cada individuo y cada grupo puede y debe tener garantizado su derecho a vivir y a
desarrollar su identidad, pero tambin a buscar, en el dilogo intercultural la mezcla de
pertenencias con instrumentos inditos de hibridacin lingstica y cognoscitiva, pero
tambin con la fuerza de la imaginacin creadora (ibid., p. 67).

Within this new kind of universality that, following the criticism of M.

Beuchot (1999), cannot be univocal but only analogical the way to pru-
dential rationality is open. It claims the anticipative ability of imagination
and in it there is the bioethical horizon of a valorisation of the life (integrity
of life, right to political life, access to goods and information, right to hospi-
tality and to an harmonic ecology) (Martin, 2014) as a practice of diversity
and exercise of harmonization.

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge-JMK, 2016, 1(2), 109-123

ISSN: 2499-930X 121
 Victor Martin Fiorino

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